Motorcycle legends die hard

Ducati rider Valentino Rossi of Italy walks towards his machine on the sand after crashing out from the MotoGP class race in the Japanese Grand Prix at the Twin Ring Motegi circuit in Motegi on October 2, 2011.

PHOTO: TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA, AFP/Getty Images

Ducati rider Valentino Rossi of Italy powers his machine during the second practice session of the Malaysian Grand Prix MotoGP motorcycling race at Sepang on October 21, 2011.

Originally published: December 6, 2012

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For the world’s greatest motorcycle racer, it’s an ignominious retreat. Valentino Rossi, for those of you not diehard bikey fans, is Michael Schumacher, Wayne Gretzky and an impish, if not quite as self-destructive, Steve-O all wrapped up into one photogenic package, his star power transcending the comparatively small world of motorcycle racing. He has won more premier class road racing titles than any active rider (and more than anyone, save Giacomo Agostini, who has long since retired), he has been the foil by which many other great racers will be judged (the recently retired Max Biaggi and current MotoGP champion, Jorge Lorenzo) and he is the doom of others (Spain’s Sete Giberneau was once touted as the next big thing until Rossi brow beat him into obscurity). He is the sport’s ringmaster, its spokesman and its elder statesman. He is, quite simply, the face of motorcycling.

And now he is a failure.

Two years and 36 races after the dream union of an Italian world champion and an Italian motorsports powerhouse was sanctified, Rossi abandons the good ship Ducati a much chastened man, looking for a return to glory by beating a hasty retreat to his former employer, Yamaha. It’s a particularly ignominious retreat as, for the first time in his career, he will be the No. 2 rider on the team (current champion Jorge Lorenzo will be continue as the team’s lead). After two years with no wins and barely a podium to show for his efforts at Ducati, Rossi’s talents, once thought invincible, are now suspect.

His fall from grace has been as dramatic as any in sport. Rossi, after all, was the motorcycling god who could transform any machine, no matter how lethargic, into a championship winner. Indeed, in 2004, he switched from the then all-conquering Hondas to the then second-rate Yamaha simply because it was too easy to win aboard HRC’s RC211V (Rossi seemed particularly incensed by Honda’s assertion that his domination was more about its machine than his riding). In the stuff of legend, Rossi, and his long-standing crew chief, Jeremy Burgess, transformed the previously uncompetitive Yamaha M1 into a title winner in their first season. Imagine Michael Schumacher winning in a Minardi and you have some idea of the feat.

Pretty much everyone — and that includes this thoroughly blinded scribe — thus took it for granted that his magic would work equally well on the Ducati as it had for Yamaha. After all, Casey Stoner had managed 23 race wins aboard the recalcitrant Ducati and he was but an upstart and not nearly of Rossi’s caliber.

As it turns out, Stoner prospered after his move to Honda while Rossi’s turn at Ducati went from disappointing to floundering before culminating, ultimately, in despair. It’s always difficult to watch your heroes fail, but watching Rossi transformed from perennial front-runner to also-ran in the span of a just a few races was a shock from which the motorcycle racing world has still not recovered.

Of course, while everyone has their theories on why Rossi failed so miserably, it has revived the conjecture that the incredible pressure of an Italian rider racing for an Italian team simply crushes all before it. Indeed, Ducati seems to be a graveyard for home-brewed riders. Loris Capirossi won seven races for the Bologna-based motorcycle manufacturer (now owned by Audi, by the way) yet the diabolically handling Desmosedici forced the former GP125 and GP250 champion into early retirement. The same bike whipped fellow Italian Marco Melandri’s butt so bad that he retreated to World Superbike. Both, by the way, have since shown their talent undiminished, Melandri almost winning this year’s superbike crown aboard a BMW and Capirossi turning the second-fastest time during some testing despite not having ridden in anger for more than a year.

Indeed, the only real success Ducati has enjoyed has been with Australian Casey Stoner, whose 2007 MotoGP championship aboard the obstreperous Ducati has now been put into proper perspective. And yet, the iconoclastic Aussie, who current world champion Jorge Lorenzo, says is the “greatest riding talent he’s ever seen,” was cast aside like yesterday’s American Idol when rumours of Ducati’s Rossi-fication first surfaced in 2010.

Nor is this a disease solely relegated to the two-wheeled world. Ferrari has looked high and low for an Italian driver to carry the prancing horse flag in Formula 1, yet there have been no full-time home-brewed stars driving Ferraris for more than two decades (Giancarlo Fisichella was but a part-time replacement for the injured Felipe Massa) and no Italian has won the Formula 1 championship in a Ferrari since Alberto Ascari in 1953. Yet the search goes on. So xenophobic are Italian racing fans that Ferrari has even courted Rossi over the past few years to jump to Formula 1, despite his automotive resume boasting little four-wheeled experience other than an occasional rallye and a few staged tests in an F1 car.

Fans of sport the world over need heroes to worship. But the greater that worship, the more wilting the pressure to perform. Sometimes, those expectations exceed the grasp of even the greatest of talents. Perhaps we Canadians are lucky that Wayne Gretzky never played out his career as a Toronto Maple Leaf.